It's Back to School Season!
A Guide to Navigating Vaccine Exemptions
Is that a Freudian slip or Intentional?
It’s that time of year again, when children are fussing and screaming in doctor’s offices as they get their shots for the school year. Or is it?
As trust in the system is imploding I suspect some parents for the first time are questioning all of those jabs that their child supposedly needs to attend school in the United States. Some might be discovering that they didn’t like them all along.
There’s also the issue that many so called Institutes of Higher Learning are requiring Covid “vaccines” AND boosters in order to attend. This is a travesty for young people who are almost certainly at far greater risk of injuries or death from the jabs than from the respiratory illness the shots were purported to stop. And the “vaccines” obviously don’t stop it either. It’s well past time for the lawsuits to begin on that one.
To me any “Institute of Higher Learning” that illogically still pushes these jabs is obviously not going to teach my children anything that I’d want them to know. I recognize that some people due to scholarships, grants, past attendance credits or other reasons, might feel that they need to go there. The steps to get an exemption in the cases of college or university attendance is going to be:
Find the school in question.
Read the policy of that institution
Find an exemption that works for you
My lawyer uncle was helping people with vaccine exemption forms for awhile last year. He told me that since religious exemptions are allowed by law, and nobody is allowed to scrutinize a person’s religion, then the mandates wouldn’t stand. The reality was quite different for many people. Some institutions would rubber stamp anything while in the US military pastors with a 30 year history, citing a dissertation full of biblical quotes, would still get denied.
My experience with enrolling my daughters in school is very similar. It is well known that children cannot attend school in the USA without a bunch of vaccines. Really though it is not as difficult as it is made out to be. I’ve successfully enrolled my girls in school in multiple places. Here’s how.
The first thing to do is a search for your state to determine what type of vaccine exemptions are available. Most states have religious and medical exemptions and some states have personal belief exemptions. All have been under attack in various ways.
A personal belief exemption is usually the “easiest,” but restrictions around the use of this have tightened in states that offer it. My ex has noted to me that although Michigan still accepts personal belief exemptions to vaccines, he is required to take a class educating him on vaccines before he signs off that he is still opposed. My older daughter was grandfathered in on a personal belief exemption in California prior to the passage of SB277, which eliminated both philosophical and religious exemptions to vaccines for school children. After the passage I knew of some California parents that found a sympathetic doctor who was willing to write a medical exemption for their child.
Medical boards then proceeded to go on a witch hunt after doctors who wrote medical exemptions for any reason. In theory these should be available to a lot of children. In practice your child has to already be dead from a prior documented adverse reaction to get one. I’ve also heard that such medical exemptions have to be renewed each year, so once your kid has cleared their leukemia or whatever it’s back to the jibby jabs. They also are granted on a per vaccine basis, so an allergy to an ingredient in a vaccine, say, will usually simply lead to an alternative vaccine that does not have that being offered instead.
My first rule is to be willing to let go of school options that do not work for you. Due to the Covid shutdowns my daughter is currently in a US based homeschool program. Acellus learning has been very satisfactory for her, but I will admit that it is a lot of work. There are homeschool based learning pods with activities, though I am sadly not in an area that offers them right now. I don’t normally endorse social media, but due to its broad base and reach facebook homeschooling groups in your area can start you in the right direction.
If you are in a state that does not offer philosophical exemptions to vaccines, then you may have to file a religious exemption. Some parents are squeamish about this but I don’t believe that they should be. I for one am religiously opposed to harming my child in order for them to attend a school. I feel there’s aspects of coercion that violate basic tenants of human self determination that cross into every religion I’ve studied. I could quote Reverend Martin Luther King or quotes from Buddhist texts about the sanctity of the body. I probably am more comfortable than most people are talking religion. Don’t let that discourage you.
Your beliefs do not have to be consistent, coherent, in alignment with mainstream religious practice of your affiliation, or otherwise exactly over the target to be accepted. They simply need to be sincere. You do not need a permission slip signed from your priest attesting to the fact that you have attended church every Sunday for the last 30 years, nor do you need to join a sect of trans vegan hari krishnas, in order for your religious exemption to be upheld. It does take a little shopping around to find sympathetic administrators, and every school is different.
When I was looking for schools for my younger girl in Las Vegas, I went to three different ones that were night and day in how they upheld religious exemptions. At the first one the administrators looked at me like I had grown a second head when I inquired. The three of them looked too young to have any school age children, and operated as sort of a mean girl tribe. They went on about how some all powerful bureaucrat would be checking records and they didn’t know anything about this strange religious exemption that I spoke of. I did not put my daughter in that school, even though Eliza had met her teacher, who seemed very nice. The teacher sadly called me a few days later to inquire what went wrong, sounding near desperate. My guess was that the admins up front hadn’t heard of religious exemptions to vaccines because they wouldn’t deal with them. I don’t want my child in a school that she is not welcome.
The public school in our area was very by the books. I had a Nevada religious exemption in my hand that I had printed out. The administrator summoned the school nurse, who asked me a few questions about which vaccines I was opposed to. I said “Basically all of them.” The school nurse said that I would have to list them one by one, which surprised me. I’d done my research and probably listed off the top of my head more than the nurse might have even known existed. I was opposed to DTAP and MMR and meningitis, rotavirus, varicella, influenza, hpv gardasil, hep B, hep A, OPV and…the nurse seemed impressed the more I listed. That school was okay.
The charter school meanwhile had their own separate sheet for religious exemptions, and one of the administrators was talking on the phone in Spanish with a parent about how to get an exemption to vacunas. I suspected that they were aggressively trying to move up the school achievement rankings which quietly cater to the antivax crowd. I remember at my older girl’s school in California an administrator remarked offhand at a party that “Whenever I see a high achiever at the top of our class at the school, I can almost always find a vaccine exemption form in their file.” That school was wonderful until lockdown lunacy hit.
In case any of you are wondering, in Thailand when my girls were enrolled there nobody asked a thing about vaccines. “What you need a vaccine to go to school for?” My husband Oh said regarding the practice. “If you want vaccine just go to the clinic!” I suspect that changed with Covidcon but quite frankly they made such a clown show of education the world over that I’m still not quite ready to wade back in.
On the other side I literally do not know what people do who get all of those vaccines for their kids. Do they make you get all of them, every year, or is it just one time at the beginning that they check it? Do you get calls in the middle of the school year saying “Well little Jimmy is overdue for his yearly flu shot. You’ve got to schedule him by next Thursday or he’ll be kicked out of school.”? I really don’t know and am a little curious. And is anyone pushing the Covid jabs this year? California tried but rolled it back for the little ones. I think Washington DC might still have that mandate for kids.
Do you have any experiences enrolling kids in school or with University jab mandates or otherwise? Sometimes all it takes is an awkward conversation and the willingness to stand your ground if they don’t give the answer you like. At least that’s my experience. You don’t want your kid in a school of bullies. They’re usually the worst achievers.
Medical boards are the new inquisition committees. Doctors are the new priests.
We’re going through this here somewhat — B.C. (Before Covid) we followed the schedule, as its the thing you’re apparently supposed to do. There are the from newborn to toddler regular checkups that usually involve a round of jabs for the kids. Our kids have as far as we know tolerated them fine, never had an immediate reaction. There are then the school entrance milestones where our state enforces some demonstration of having this or that injection. Kindergarten, middle school, high school, coming into a new school involves presenting medical forms.
This year a middle school threshold hit us (https://drflurmgooglybean.substack.com/p/prepping-for-the-school-checkup?r=r6d2x&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web). I probably need to do a follow up post, though some things are still in flight maybe.
Upshot (puns always intended) is this week we put in a religious exception for the first time. And this is not because we have a scriptural doctrine based prohibition against some of these — indeed we’ve done the full shebang for our oldest and most for the other kids. But it is interesting though in our state there is actually ONLY the religious option (medical too, but that I know is not happening given my kids had most of the sequence already). They infact in documentation seem to imply scrutiny is to prevent any other kind of argument. So we’re trying religious, even though I believe I can make a pretty strong scientific case that in the US most of the shots are likely unnecessary, and risk/benefit is at best a wash.
I think I also learned a bit from my experience trying to do this with my employer, where I laid out a pretty strong ‘informed consent is literally impossible’ case against. FULLY referenced. I was way too specific, and my exception I think therefore remains in some kind of limbo. The few others where I work that essentially put “none of your f’ing business” were approved (doubt that was literally what they put, but some I know could have).
I was tempted to list that we are devout Jedi (something the middle schooler would be completely onboard with, albeit dark side), and that injections interfere with our midichlorian levels, inhibiting religious practice. But I left it vague. Did not even name a religion, just stated although we have had these in the past we find due to sincerely held religious beliefs (that phrase I think important, and lifted direct from American Disabilities Act) we are unable to do them. Less info is more I think. They want to bait you into something they can argue against. We see what happens, like I said still in flight.
All this said, its not unlikely we do later on go ahead with TDaP — but it will take me time to read the literature, look at data and make an actual risk assessment. To first order the form is a shot across the bow that we’re not taking anybody’s word for this ever again. If there is trouble I will be loaded for bear.